Landowners say a heavily subsidized effort to beat back a spruce budworm outbreak in northern Maine shows early signs of success.
Over five days in June, planes and helicopters sprayed pesticide on more than 240,000 acres of timberland in Aroostook County, according to state records.
Spruce budworm is a native pest that experiences periodic overpopulation. Such outbreaks can result in damaged and dead spruce and fir trees that are devoured by the hungry bugs.
Alex Ingraham President of Pingree Associates said this was the first year of an early intervention program to tamp down emerging spruce budworm hotspots.
Based on areal surveys, the plan has prevented damage to woodlands in the far northern parts of the state bordering Canada.
"There’s green healthy trees in the treatment area and if you go right across the border in Quebec there’s the brown and what was red from the defoliation," Ingraham said.
Timber companies are trying to avoid a repeat of a massive budworm outbreak 50 years ago that devastated the north Maine woods.
Seven landowners received a total of $9.8 million dollars from a federal allocation to support the spray program. The program uses pesticides specially designed to target caterpillars that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency classifies as "practically nontoxic" to mammals and birds.
Irving Woodlands treated the largest area, over 106,000 acres, and was reimbursed more than $4.3 million according to state records.
Maine's early intervention program is modeled on a similar effort in New Brunswick which has kept a major budworm outbreak at bay for a decade.
But Ingraham said a similar dedication in Maine will take millions of dollars annually to succeed. That price is still cheaper than letting budworm spread out of control and threaten the state's forest health and economy, he added.
"The economic impact of not doing anything is far greater than the cost of treating it. In orders of magnitude," Ingraham said.
